Thursday, September 04, 2014

The flipside of Dominic Lawson II

If you insert the term "inscrutable Asiatic countenance" in Google, you only get a couple of results. One likes to think that this is because few people would use such a horrendously racist stereotype.

EDIT: Just this evening I came across this remarkable commentary. Do we really, in 2014, want our president to talk about girls dressing as if they "were on the game", or to use phrases like "debauched as her demeanour seems intended to demonstrate"?

11 comments:

I am just as unimpressed by DL's views on football or his general political views as you are, but I would expect these things will not feature very largely in his role as ECF President. The ECF (rightly) does have an inclusive agenda, but we should remember that Tories play chess, too.

He does seem to have the right credentials for promoting chess and I wish him well in the post.

So we should, but that's nothing to do with it, is it? It's not a question of whether Lawson is right or left, it's a question of whether he has a tendency to be objectionable about other social groups, which he plainly does.

The ECF (rightly) does have an inclusive agenda

On paper (or on Twitter) it does. But how do "inscrutable Asiatic countenance" and "poofter" fit in with that, I wonder?

Lawson was also famous for his dismissive verbal comments about chessplayers during the 1993 world title match, e.g. his comment after a minor error by Miles "That's why [those GMs and IMs] are in the analysis room earning pin money while Short and Kasparov are playing for millions."

What ejh said. I can think of a number of right-wing people in chess who would be fine when it came to inclusivity. (I can't, for example, readily imagine David Sedgwick writing articles like the ones quoted.)

Jack knows David better than me. But several well known players with right wing views used offensive language and stereotyping in the wake of t-shirt gate. I wasn't completely comfortable with the Paulson meme on this site either.

But 1994 was 20 years ago. The Conservatives were defending clause 28 at that time. I would not be surprised if DL's public opinion change at the same time as Cameron's in 2004.